SMUG Social Media University Global

Twitter 121: Sharing Photos with TwitPic

Note: This is the first in a series of reviews of third-party applications that are part of the Twitter ecosystem. If you would like to write a review of another application, please contact the Chancellor about becoming a SMUG Associate Professor.

Twitpic is a site that lets you share photos using your Twitter account. It’s easy to use; You don’t even need to sign up separately. You just log in with your Twitter username and password:

Then, from the main page you can click the “Upload Photo” link:

This starts a three-step process. First you select your image (I chose for the sake of illustration to use the same image I embedded above):

Then you enter information about the photo, including where it was taken and tags. If you use a real address, the photo will show up in a Google maps mash-up. I’m trying a non-standard approach for this one:

Finally, you enter your Tweet and hit “Post It”

Here’s what the Tweet will look like in your timeline on Twitter:

The link to your photo shows up right after your username, and if people click that link they can see and comment on it.

And of course, their comments also become Tweets:

And from the TwitPic site you can share the photo via several other social networking platforms:

Lest you think TwitPic is just for screen shots, here’s the first photo I shared via TwitPic. I was in San Francisco earlier this year and caught my first foul ball at a major league baseball game.

Assignments:

Sign up for Twitter if you haven’t previously.
Comment on my baseball photo.
Follow me on Twitter (I’ll follow you back.)
Upload your own photo to TwitPic.

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Yammer 202: Video Yammercasting

As I learned by trial and error, and as Keith from the Yammer team confirmed in the comments on Yammer 201, there is a limit on the file sizes you can share through Yammer: 20 MB. I had tried a 35 MB file, but that was rejected as being too large.

But there doesn’t seem to be a file type limitation. I did a 1:25 video yammercast (17 MB) yesterday and it worked well. I interviewed myself via Flip and then sent the QuickTime file via Yammer to one of my work teams.

It did take them a couple of minutes to download, so when you yammercast a larger file you may want to be sure to include some significant text in the Yammer post, so that in case the recipients don’t download the video they would still get the main point of the communication.

Keith included a helpful link to the Yammer blog that gives more detail on the file-sharing feature.

Yammer has built a lean, efficient platform for sharing. I like how photos that can be suitably displayed through the Yammer interface are embedded in posts, but larger, more complicated audio and video files can just be downloaded to be seen or heard in QuickTime or Windows Media Player.

If you want to share video with the world, YouTube is your great choice. But if you want to confine the distribution to your company, or to a work group within your company, try a yammercast.

Yammer 201: Yammer as Internal Podcast Platform

The fact that we’re in the 200-level courses doesn’t mean we’re done with the 100 level, but that we’re talking about an unorthodox and somewhat creative use of the Yammer platform.

As I indicated in Yammer 110, Yammer now allows the upload and sharing of documents or files. And it’s not just limited to PDFs, spreadsheets or Word documents. You also can upload mp3 files, and I did one of those that was 18 MB.

That got me thinking: what if a company decided to use Yammer as a way of distributing “podcasts” to its employees?

It would be unconventional, which is why I put “podcasts” in quotes. A podcast is typically considered a series of audio or video files to which you can subscribe via RSS. By that measure, a Yammer “podcast” wouldn’t exactly fit the definition.

So I’m coining a new term:

Yammercasting

A yammercast is an audio file you distribute through Yammer, and it has some significant advantages over other means of distribution.

Continue reading “Yammer 201: Yammer as Internal Podcast Platform”

Yammer 110: File Sharing with Yammer

In Yammer 104 I wrote about how Yammer can be an all-purpose GTD reference filing system, and not just for individuals but for a company. You can write relatively brief posts about a topic, and can include hyperlinks to external Web sites or to intranet pages.

But what if the information you want to share is in the form of a document, not a Web site URL?

After my return from the Thanksgiving weekend, and as I was posting something to my personal journal in Yammer, I noticed an interesting feature that provides a great answer to this question:

An “Attach File” icon was at the lower left of the text box! So I decided to upload a document to another group I’ve formed, for our Social Media Team. And here’s what that Yammer post looks like:

So my team members can just click the link to the attachment and download the PDF I posted. I don’t need to send the PDF as an email attachment, but my team members know the document is there to be reviewed if they want to download it.

This is a really well-done feature, with an interface that matches the conventions we’ve come to expect for uploading files. And it makes a significant step toward making Yammer the all-purpose knowledge-sharing service for the enterprise.

The updated version of Yammer’s iPhone application supports viewing the attachments that are included in Yammer posts. That’s well integrated, too, although I couldn’t view Word documents as I can within the iPhone Mail application. But for viewing PDFs it was fine.

I uploaded a few different file types as a test: PDF, Word (.doc) and even a couple of mp3 files. The largest file I tried was 18 MB, and it worked flawlessly. Maybe the Yammer team can fill us in on the file types that are supported, and any size limitations.

But meanwhile, if you haven’t yet tried Yammer, I’d encourage you to explore it, and the SMUG Yammer curriculum can be your step-by-step guide. I’m impressed at the way Yammer is continually improving its product and adding important and useful features.

200 SMUGgles Learning Social Media Together

With the exception of composing my annual Thanksgiving letter/post, I was pretty much unplugged from the Web over this long holiday weekend. It was a great time with family and working on some projects, like hanging our outdoor Christmas lights and insulating the North Annex.

But I did check in briefly Saturday morning and saw that our SMUG student union (a.k.a. Facebook group) had 201 members, which meant that we had 200 SMUGgles besides me. And as I check this morning, we’re up to 204, with members from most U.S. states and every continent except Antarctica.

How cool is that?

Actually, that number probably understates the true number of SMUGgles, because we have well over 200 subscribers to our RSS feed and nearly 400 who are following my Tweets. There may be some overlap among the three groups, but we likely have some unique members in each.

Thanks to everyone who has enrolled in Social Media University, Global to learn about social media together. Unlike traditional models of education, in which a low student/teacher ratio is considered beneficial, with SMUG we all gain by having more people participating. I may be the Chancellor, but in reality we’re all SMUGgles (with apologies to J.K. Rowling): ordinary humans who possess no wizard-like powers, but who want to do magical things using social media tools. More about tools in a future post.

If you’ve found our coursework helpful, I hope you’ll take a moment to share SMUG with your friends, co-workers or members of your non-profit volunteer organizations. You will not only help them by introducing social media tools like blogging, podcasting, Facebook and Twitter that they can use (or you can use together with them on joint projects), but you’ll also make SMUG stronger, as we will have more people sharing and contributing, and we can learn from each other.

For instance, Norway’s Jan Husdal, who became our first SMUG associate professor, taught me how to embed the social sharing toolbar on posts in WordPress.com. Our student body name, the SMUGgles, came from Jim Streed of Green Bay, Wisc. And I think we may be welcoming another associate professor soon.

I hope you’ll use the toolbar below to share this post with your Facebook friends, either by posting it to your profile or singling out some particular friends by sending directly to them as a message. Or feel free to use any of the other sharing buttons (or tweet about it on Twitter) to otherwise spread the word.

If you’re not yet a SMUGgle, you can enroll in Social Media University, Global through one of the options on this page.